The Legend of Tarzan — Review
One of those characters like Robin Hood or Batman who never lets a decade go by without a return to the big screen, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ iconic ape-man now enters the digital age in the period adventure film ‘The Legend of Tarzan.’ This Tarzan has been domesticated since his jungle childhood, and lives in London as Lord Greystoke in the late nineteenth century with his wife Jane.
Belgium’s King Leopold invites Tarzan, who in this world is known to the public as a kind of folk hero, to come see the great things he’s been doing to his colonized Congo territory. Persuaded by the American George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson), who suspects Leopold has the country enslaved, Tarzan reluctantly agrees. Adventure happens.
As Tarzan, Alexander Skarsgård is good enough to be the main reason I wish this movie was better. Inexplicably the Australian Margot Robbie does an American accent in this movie, sounding more like a 21st-century valley girl than someone you can buy existing this far back in the past. And although they do their best to make the character strong and intelligent, she still seems to exist mainly to get saved by Tarzan.
Samuel L. Jackson gives a hammy performance, which also feels distractingly modern, and Christoph Waltz is of course adequately creepy as the sadistic bad guy. The movie is directed by David Yates, who is known for doing the last four Harry Potter movies, and is set to return to that world this fall with ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.’ Yates doesn’t infuse this movie with much of a memorable visual style, and though the locations are beautiful, not all of the digital special effects blend in seamlessly with the in-camera stuff. In one vine-swinging-onto-a-train sequence, ignoring the bad green-screen work, I couldn’t help but feel that these characters were actually on zip-lines, as well as the irony that a Tarzan movie wouldn’t understand how vines work.
Although I appreciated that this wasn’t exactly an epic Tarzan movie, with a 2 1/2-hour run time and the first half-hour devoted to Tarzan’s jungle childhood and meeting Jane, the fact that this movie will suddenly cut to flash-backs while its own story is well-underway is obnoxious and slows things down when the story should be racing. Overall I’d say it’s the pacing and tone that ultimately kill this picture. I already mentioned the awkwardly-placed flashbacks and also this movie bounces around from dark and serious stuff to bad corny humor too frequently. It’s not terrible, and has its fun moments but lacks enough character, (good) humor and spectacle to recommend as a summer blockbuster.
